Free The Sacred Blood by Michael Byrnes Page B

assistant, who was already halfway down the corridor. Adrenaline was helping her to pretend that she hadn’t just witnessed Evan’s murder.
    12.
    Orlando unclipped the geneticist’s ID badge from a neck strap he’d spotted on her desk and waved it in the air. “Hey! Take this,” he called loudly. On the other side of the glass partition, his partner was trying unsuccessfully to unlock the door through which the three had escaped and was preparing to blast a hole through the lock. The facilities on this floor required higher security access than what was permitted by the badge he’d forcefully “borrowed” from the undersize tech he’d stuffed into a utility closet in the parking garage.
    Kwiatkowski—his shirt and lab coat drenched with coffee; the front of his neck blistered and red—raced in to retrieve the key card.
    “I’ll handle this,” Orlando said, eyeing the computer monitor. “You go.” He waved toward the metal door. “And put that away,” he ordered, eyeing the man’s Glock.
    Tucking the gun into a concealed underarm holster, Kwiatkowski rushed next door, opened the metal door with the first card swipe, and disappeared beyond.
    Orlando grinned when he saw a laptop patched into the workstation’s dummy terminal. Shortly after giving up Donovan’s name, the Vatican priest, Father Martin, had since called to inform him of an American geneticist’s involvement in the project too. The cleric couldn’t recall her name, but he’d remembered invoices paid to her Phoenix-based employer, BioMedical Solutions, Inc.
    After Donovan had fled his shop, Orlando and Kwiatkowski had scoured Belfast for his motorcycle, with no results. It was while they were ransacking his home that the call came through on Orlando’s cell phone— results from traces run on Donovan’s passport and credit cards. By then, Donovan’s Aer Lingus flight to JFK International had already lifted off Belfast International’s runway.
    Though the priest had been one step ahead, they hadn’t been far behind.
    Their employer’s private Learjet had swiftly begun closing the gap. While in the air, another credit card trace came through, showing Donovan had purchased a second fare on Continental Airlines. A search of flight manifests had him en route to Phoenix—home of BioMedical Solutions, Inc. The Learjet arrived an hour ahead of Donovan’s flight, plenty of time for Orlando to make a preliminary visit to BioMedical Solutions’s downtown headquarters. While the guard at the security desk provided him directions to the nearest men’s room, Orlando had discreetly stuck a dime-size microphone to the underside of the granite countertop. When Donovan finally arrived, the adversarial conversation he had with the guards had been crisply transmitted to Orlando’s cell phone.
    Next, Orlando studied the geneticist’s desk.
    Luckily, whatever she had been working on wasn’t on the company’s main server. That saved lots of time and risk in trying to decrypt passwords and navigate sophisticated firewalls. He unplugged the laptop and tucked it under his arm.
    Was this woman Donovan’s accomplice? Whatever the case, the fact that she was a geneticist was troublesome. Because if she’d examined the bones ...
    His eyes made a quick inventory of the framed photos on her desk. Mostly shots of an older man whose facial similarities suggested he was her father. He snatched the photo that showed her face most clearly.
    Next came the desk. In the top drawer, he found some business cards among the paper clips, Post-it pads, and pens. “Dr. Charlotte Hennesey. Executive vice president of genetic research,” he read, impressed. He slipped one into his pocket.
    The bottom drawer gave up her abandoned Coach purse. He pulled it out, unzipped it, and rifled through the wallet. The bad news was her credit cards were left behind and there were no keys. The trail would be that much harder to follow. The good news was her Arizona driver’s license had